Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [266]
The flirting, then, had to stop. Near the end of the picture, Nancy was in her trailer alone. Wearing only jeans and a brassiere, she went to her closet to pick out a shirt. She had just removed her bra when Elvis popped out of the closet. It was an awkward moment—she tried to cover herself, and then she laughed. Elvis pulled her to him.
“He just got very quiet. He just held me . . . and he lifted up my face and he kissed me, and I started to melt. I really thought I was going to die. Then he pulled away and looked at me and said, ‘I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry.’ And he went out.”
Elvis would appear the supreme cad in pursuing a costar only months after marrying and impregnating his live-in Lolita. But now that Priscilla was going to be a mother, his sexual interest in her had all but disappeared.
At first he blamed it on the fact that she constantly slathered her stomach with cocoa butter to stave off stretch marks. He couldn’t stand the smell and would have to leave the room. They fought about it—she was so sensitive with her hormones in flux—and one night she threw the whole container at him. He threw nothing back, he later told girlfriend Mindi Miller, because “first of all, she’s a girl and she’s pregnant, and she’s my wife. You don’t do that as a southern gentleman.”
The larger problem was that Elvis now further equated Priscilla with Gladys. It was a huge psychological and emotional quagmire, Priscilla would say, that neither one of them fully understood. Elvis only knew that any woman who’d had a child was a turnoff for him, and he wanted nothing to do with her sexually.
“He just didn’t feel comfortable doing that,” says Joe. “Sometimes if I met somebody I was going to introduce him to, I’d tell her, ‘Don’t say you have a kid.’ There were a couple of other girls he dated who were mothers, but he never knew it. In other words, they weren’t big affairs, just small little events.”
“I guess he had a Madonna complex,” Priscilla sums up. While she has written that having Lisa Marie was the end of intimacy, she now says, “No, no, of course we were having sex! I mean, he was Elvis, after all, and I must say he was very creative, very playful.’ ”
Just after the wedding, when Elvis and Priscilla returned to the ranch, it was a “magical time,” says Jerry. Elvis was calm and happy, Priscilla was glad to be out of Graceland and the big L.A. houses, and everyone got along. They really did feel like one big family, Jerry thought. “Somehow, after a false start, Elvis’s dream of a cowboy commune seemed to be working perfectly.”
But by August, Elvis had lost interest in the ranch, and Vernon began to sell off the trucks, the trailers, and the cattle, and soon he would look for buyers for the land, too. Dr. Nick had already observed that this was a pattern with Elvis: “He never seemed to be attached to anything for very long. He would pick up a sport or some new thing, and it would last just a few weeks or a few months.”
When Elvis did spend time at the ranch, he wasn’t so interested in horses as he was in target practice. That was his new fixation now, and he started buying rifles, clay targets, and ear protectors with all the zeal he poured into his earlier hobbies. That October, he got whatever western fix he needed on his last picture of the year, Stay Away, Joe, where he again played a Native American, this time as a rodeo rider.
By fall, he already had another residence in mind. Graceland would always symbolize his hopes for a happy life, but he wanted a new home that would nurture a more intimate family atmosphere. Around the same time that Vernon auctioned off equipment at the Circle G Ranch, Elvis and Priscilla bought their first Beverly Hills home, a smaller, four-bedroom house at 1174 Hillcrest Road in Trousdale Estates. Only Charlie Hodge and Patsy and Gee Gee Gambill would live with them there. They finalized the sale in November. Elvis said he liked it because it gave them so much privacy.
Then in December, the seventh month of Priscilla’s pregnancy, he dropped a bomb on her in